But if she had been a Delilah she couldn’t have betrayed me more completely.  Frosty motioned imperatively for me to go on, but I had pulled up at her first word, and there I stood, waiting for her to finish, that I might explain that I had not lightly broken my promise; that I was compelled to cut off that extra sixty miles which would have made me, perhaps, too late.  But I didn’t tell her anything; there wasn’t time.  Frosty, waiting disapprovingly a length ahead, looked back and beckoned again insistently.  At the same instant a door behind the girl opened with a jerk, and King himself bulked large and angry in the lamplight.  Beryl shrank backward with a little cry—­and I knew she had not meant to do me a hurt.

“Come on, you fool!” cried Frosty, and struck his horse savagely.  I jabbed in my spurs, and Shylock leaped his length and fled down that familiar trail to the “gantlet,” as I had always called it mentally after that second passing.  But King, behind us, fired three shots quickly, one after another—­and, as the bullets sang past, I knew them for a signal.

A dozen men, as it seemed to me, swarmed out from divers places to dispute our passing, and shots were being fired in the dark, their starting-point betrayed by vicious little spurts of flame.  Shylock winced cruelly, as we whipped around the first shed, and I called out sharply to Frosty, still a length ahead.  He turned just as my horse went down to his knees.

I jerked my feet from the stirrups and landed free and upright, which was a blessing.  And it was then that I swung morally far back to the primitive, and wanted to kill, and kill, with never a thought for parley or retreat.  Frosty, like the stanch old pal he was, pulled up and came back to me, though the bullets were flying fast and thick—­and not wide enough for derision on our part.

“Jump up behind,” he commanded, shooting as he spoke.  “We’ll get out of this damned trap.”

I had my doubts, and fired away without paying him much attention.  I wanted, more than anything, to get the man who had shot down Shylock.  That isn’t a pretty confession, but it has the virtue of being the truth.  So, while Frosty fired at the spurts of red and cursed me for stopping there, I crouched behind my dead horse and fought back with evil in my heart and a mighty poor aim.

Then, just as the first excitement was hardening into deliberate malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols.  It was our boys—­thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs, and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than any one else in the crowd.

“Ellis!” he shouted, and I lifted up my voice and let him know that, like Webster, “I still lived.”  They came on with a rush that the King faction could not stay, to where I was ambushed between the solid walls of two sheds, with Shylock’s bulk before me and Frosty swearing at my back.